As computers become more pervasive and are increasingly used outside of the traditional office environment (e.g., personal digital video recorders), end users are demanding that their computers produce less and less noise. A typical personal computer includes three main sources of noise: the cooling system (typically a fan), the power supply (and its cooling system), and the hard disk drive. Other components, such as optical drives, typically make noise only on user demand, and therefore are perceived as somewhat less annoying to the end users.
Most end users are concerned with the total amount and quality of noise that they perceive as coming from their computer. Whether the noise is coming primarily from the hard disk drive or the fan directly, or rather involves a resonance of the computer housing caused by vibration of a component, is irrelevant to most users. Although manufacturers of the various components of a computer may successfully reduce the noise of their individual components, the extent to which that noise reduction is perceived by the end user depends strongly upon how the noise and vibration from that component interacts with the rest of the computer.
For instance, the hard-disk-drive-related acoustics of the system are determined by the interaction between the hard disk drive and the remainder of the system. The hard disk drive emits airborne noise directly, which can be altered or contained by the system. The hard disk drive also vibrates both in- and out-of-plane. These vibrations can excite the mechanics of the system, causing the system to radiate sound, or they may be damped by the system and contribute minimally to noise perceived by the end user.
To make the matter yet more complicated, most sounds consist of a broad range of frequencies, and human hearing sensitivity to these frequencies is nonuniform. To approximate the way the human ear responds to sound levels at different frequencies, several frequency-weighting schemes have been used to develop composite decibel scales. The “A-weighted” decibel scale (dB(A)) is the most widely used.
Although the A-weighted sound power level is widely used to state acoustical design goals as a single number, its usefulness is limited because it gives no information on spectral content. A-weighted sound power levels correlate well with human judgments of relative loudness, but give no information on spectral balance. More sophisticated psychoacoustic sound quality metrics such as loudness, sharpness, and roughness better address the human perception of the frequency and time characteristics of emitted noise. However, these metrics are largely not standardized and are a function of the device, its environment, and the distance and direction to the source unlike sound power which is a device property. It is expected that the personal computer and consumer electronics industries will gradually shift from a sound power acoustic specification to a sound quality acoustic specification. Further reduction of noise from current levels, as measured by A-weighted sound power or psychoacoustic loudness, is expected to be a central component of future acoustic specifications.
Computer component manufacturers have typically been concerned with reducing the A-weighted noise produced by their particular component. However, significant reductions in the A-weighted noise of a single component in isolation may not translate into such large reductions in the total A-weighted noise produced by the computer system as a whole. Each contributor to the overall system noise has a certain frequency distribution associated with it. Reducing the noise of one component in a given frequency band may have very little impact at the system level if other components dominate in that band.
From a systems perspective, the situation is usually disappointing; components that have been advertised as being much quieter than their predecessors may have minimal impact on the total system noise. What has not yet been recognized is that this situation also produces opportunities for reducing the loudness of the noise perceived by the end user by shifting the frequency content of the noise without changing the total noise produced by each component. One way to achieve this is by altering the mounting or mechanical interface between the component and the system. In addition, it is important for the component manufacturer not to excite the resonance modes of a given system via the mechanical vibrations from the component.